Connected cars: Innovations in Intelligent Driving and Integration
Mr. Ghosn announced today at CES that the Renault-Nissan Alliance would accelerate the development and deployment of advanced connected technologies, such as Microsoft Cortana, an in-vehicle virtual personal assistant. Because future vehicles will have access to features such as Cortana speech analytics, drivers will benefit from advanced in-vehicle voice recognition and intuitive human machine interface (HMI).
Cortana will allow the vehicle to adapt to personalized driver settings, even understanding different driver preferences in a shared vehicle.
Renault-Nissan will continuously develop and launch new connected services and applications that make it easier for people to stay connected to work, entertainment and social networks. It will also offer vehicle-centric services that will simplify and enhance engagement with the car through usage-based information, remote access, remote diagnostics and preventive maintenance.
The Renault-Nissan Alliance and Microsoft signed a global, multiyear contract focused on vehicle connectivity and connected services in September 2016.
• The companies will co-develop a mutual vision for connected cars focused on improving the customer experience by making driving more intuitive, intelligent and fun.
• The two companies will work together to develop next-generation connected and mobility services for cars using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, which is built on Azure, Office 365, Cortana and other intelligent cloud services provided by Microsoft.
• The partnership will enable Renault-Nissan to develop a single global solution providing connected and mobility services for customers across all Alliance brands.
Microsoft Azure:
The Renault-Nissan Alliance is pioneering autonomous driving and connectivity features on mainstream, mass-market vehicles at affordable prices. The Alliance aims to develop connectivity technologies and features to support the launch of more than 10 vehicles with autonomous driving technology by 2020 with services to maximize better use of newly found in-car free time.
Next-generation connected services for cars will be delivered using Microsoft Connected Vehicle Platform, which is built on Microsoft Azure, one of the company's intelligent cloud offerings. This will improve customer experience via advanced navigation, predictive maintenance and vehicle centric services, remote monitoring of car features, external mobile experiences and over-the-air updates.
Microsoft Azure provides a proven, secure global cloud platform with unlimited scale that allows Renault-Nissan to deliver services worldwide to its broad customer base.
Renault-Nissan selected Azure in part because of its enterprise-grade security and Microsoft's rigorous commitment to compliance. In addition, Azure supports multiple operating systems, programming languages and tools, providing flexibility and choice to build a common platform for Renault-Nissan to deploy services to both Alliance brands.
On stage, Alliance SVP of Connected Vehicles and Mobility Services Ogi Redzic laid out the plans for the partnership and demonstrated some of Cortana’s key features.
